In Dreams Awake
for soprano and large chamber ensemble
Program Note – In Dreams Awake
When Susanna Phillips asked me to write for the Twickenham Festival her main request was that I compose a piece whose theme would mean something to the people of Huntsville. I knew from the outset that our performance would take place inside the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. So I began reflecting on outer space and the themes that come to mind: the sun, the moon, the stars, etc. I sifted through numerous texts, searching for literature that not only spoke to me but also for prose that would be compatible with my own musical language.
The title, In Dreams Awake, comes from a line of Thoreau: “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.” This line, though never fully employed in the cycle, becomes both a point of departure and a recurring theme throughout this twenty-minute work, where soft, slow, dreamlike sounds pervade.
Beginning with the last lines of Thoreau’s Walden—a depiction of dawn as the awakening of one’s mind—I turn to two writers, Stephen Crane and William Butler Yeats, each meditating on the nature of love and the night sky.
At the center of the song cycle is a one-minute bassoon solo. I’ve always loved the mystic sound of the bassoon’s high register, which serves here as an introduction to Edgar Allen Poe’s Mysterious Star.
John Gillespie Magee, an American serving as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force before the U. S. entered World War II, is most remembered for his sonnet High Flight. On the back of a letter mailed home to his parents, Magee captured the sensations of flying. He died in flight in 1941 at the age of 19. His poem remains a favorite of aviators and astronauts. It was quoted most memorably by President Ronald Reagan on January 28, 1986, the day of the Challenger disaster: “…Slipped the surly bonds of Earth…to touch the face of God.”
For years, I’ve admired Samuel Barber’s setting of James Agee’s Sure on this Shining Night. But somehow it never occurred to me to set this poem myself. When the idea of putting Agee’s deeply personal words to my own music came to me, I realized it was the perfect way to end this cycle.
Sure on this shining night
I weep for wonder
Wandring far alone
Of shadows on the stars.
Wayne Oquin
August 23, 2014
Fulshear, Texas